


It Always Ends in a Fight

by SevereStorms, wreckingthefinite



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Beefy Bucky, Bucky Barnes Remembers, But only what happened in canon, Canon Compliant, M/M, Not Quite Kinky Weight Gain, POV Bucky Barnes, Pining, Sex, Weight Gain, Weight Issues, chubby bucky, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-29 05:01:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8476321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SevereStorms/pseuds/SevereStorms, https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckingthefinite/pseuds/wreckingthefinite
Summary: In which Bucky's days in Bucharest are punctuated by chocolate, self-help magazines, street food, and the constant specter of Steve Rogers.  (Or: Bucky's Romanian Vacation: What Really Happened?)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> We have had a lot of requests for a fic that explained just how Bucky Barnes went from sleek-hottie-with-thick-thighs in TWS to life-ruining-slab-of-beef-with-cherub-cheeks in CW. This is that fic.

There are three things that he knows definitively.

His name is James Buchanan Barnes, and he is Bucky. 

He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. 

The man on the bridge, the man in the river, was Steven Grant Rogers, and he is and has always been a pain in the ass. 

These are the things he knows. 

Since he got to Bucharest, he spends a lot of time thinking about these things, and other things: things he doesn’t know but suspects, things he can only remember in strange, glittering shards of memory, beautiful and sharp like shattered glass. 

He remembers Brooklyn. He remembers a tiny two room flat with scuff marks on the floor and a bed that sagged in the middle. 

He remembers that Steve Rogers was small, with knobby shoulders, and bones as fragile as birds’ wings. He remembers counting each one of his ribs through the white translucence of his Irish skin. 

*

_1928_

Bucky thinks that Sarah Rogers looks like an angel. 

She’s thin and blonde, like her son, pretty in a delicate way. And, like Steve, she has big hands, hands that don’t exactly fit on her small, angular frame. She’s so very fair that even her eyelashes are light, gold in sunlight, and she looks almost ethereal, like she’s lit up from the inside out, glowing with some secret divinity. 

She looks so very much like Steve, and even at eleven years old, Bucky knows that maybe that’s why he likes her so much, why he thinks of her when he thinks of women, alone in his room at night, which he sometimes does. 

And he’s fascinated with her, too, because she’s nothing like his own mother, who is wide-hipped and dark-haired, quick to laugh, prone to sneaking his dad’s cigarettes and leaving telltale red lipstick stains on the butts. 

Bucky and Steve are sitting together on the fire escape when Bucky insults Steve’s ma. 

It’s one of those first days of fall, when it’s truly chilly for the first time, and Bucky’s mother had clucked her tongue at him that morning when he’d tried to squeeze into last season’s jacket. 

“We’ll have to get you a new one, James, you grow like a weed,” she’d told him, absently kissing him on the forehead in a gesture that Bucky’s probably too old for. “I’m tempted to quit feeding you, I swear.” She always tells him this every time he needs new clothes or shoes, and she always smiles when she says it, usually while handing him something from her kitchen.

So now, sitting idly on the rickety fire escape outside of Steve’s empty apartment, Bucky’s a little cold, but mostly he doesn’t mind; the sunshine is still trickling down between the buildings, enough to warm his shoulders. 

Steve’s jacket from last year fits the same as ever – which is to say, it’s still too big for him. His long, pretty fingers disappear into the sleeves, and it hangs from his shoulders, gapes in the front. 

“You wouldn’t be so skinny if you came to live at my house,” he says, elbowing Steve lightly. Bucky’s ma doesn’t have to work, like Sarah does, and so she’s always in the kitchen. She fries chicken instead of boiling it, and their apartment always smells like fresh bread or apple pie. Even when she’s busy with something else, she stops to press thick bread-and-butter sandwiches and glasses of milk into Bucky’s hands when he gets home from school in the afternoons, before she shoos him off and tells him to get out from underfoot. 

Sarah Rogers isn’t usually home after school; it’s dark out before she gets home from work, pale and tired. 

Bucky means it as a joke. A self-deprecating one, even: he’s a little chubby, maybe, although he’s not self-conscious about it. And besides, he knows the reason Steve’s small isn’t because Sarah’s not home to cook for him. Steve is Sick, with a capital S. Bucky’s ma had explained it to him in the second grade, when he’d brought Steve home to play every afternoon for a week. She’d sat Bucky down at their kitchen table and told him that since he’d picked Steve for a pal, he needed to understand something, needed to understand that he Was Sick, that he had been Since Birth, and that Bucky had to be careful with him, couldn’t knock him around play-fighting in the alley like he did with the other boys. 

Bucky had nodded very seriously, even though the truth was that Steve scrapped more than he ever did, and when Bucky _did_ get in a tussle, it was usually one that Steve started and Bucky was compelled to finish. 

Still, it’s not like Bucky doesn’t know why Steve’s small. He knows it’s not Sarah’s fault, or Steve’s, or anyone’s. 

It doesn’t matter, though; Steve punches him square in the nose as soon as the words are out of his mouth. 

Bucky’s taken a punch before—like all the boys in their neighborhood—but it’s never been Steve’s fist delivering the blow, and that’s the part that makes it hurt, makes his eyes smart a little, tears springing to their corners. 

It’s the first serious fight he’s ever had with Steve, and it make his heart hurt, almost makes him sick, in a way he doesn’t have words to describe.

That night when he gets home, he peers into the mirror to check and see if his nose is knocked uneven. Becca tells him it’d serve him right if it was crooked forever, after she hears what he said. 

*

Bucky’s nose isn’t crooked. Ninety years and several wars later, it’s still straight.

*

Sometimes Bucky doesn’t want to think about Steve, or Brooklyn, or anything that happened before.

It makes him tired, sorting it out in his mind, trying to place together memories like working a jigsaw puzzle when half the pieces are missing. 

Sometimes he just wants to exist here, in this city that feels comfortable but not familiar, speaking this language that fits easily into his mouth, although he doesn’t know how he learned it. 

He goes out, buys things he needs—shampoo, paper towels, dish soap—at the little corner store that he likes, where the pretty dark-haired girl behind the counter never looks at him like he’s anything special, never tries to make eye contact that lasts too long. She just smiles a little, no teeth, and counts back his change, setting it gently into his gloved palm. 

He brings home lunch – greasy, garlicky chicken shawarma from the vendor on the corner, the container stuffed with rice, tabbouleh, sliced vegetables dripping in tahini, warm pita bread wrapped in foil. He can cook, and he does, but he brings things like this home just as often. There’s something soothing about it, the spicy and comforting warmth of street food.

Today is one of the days when he doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to wrestle with the weight of his memories, and the food is supposed to serve as a distraction, an easy physical task to concentrate on instead of his own thoughts. 

It doesn’t work, though, and he can’t quite clear his head, no matter how much he tries. By the time he’s scraping the last bits of rice from the container, he’s stopped even trying. 

He’s thinking about the man on the bridge again. Steve. The way that he felt when Bucky dragged him out of the river. 

He’d been heavy, solid and big in Bucky’s arms, nothing like the fragile boy with the snapping blue eyes that, Bucky knows, is also Steve. 

Steve-in-the-river had been big, broad shoulders and a muscular chest, maybe bigger than Bucky, even. Except that -- except that when Bucky had slid his arm around Steve’s waist, grabbed onto him to tug him ashore, he’d felt small again, narrow and waspish, hard hipbones and a flat, muscled belly. Like Bucky could wrap his hands around the span of his middle. 

He thinks about Steve, and the way he felt, big and small at once, for longer than he should, and nothing distracts him, not even the four chocolate bars he eats, slowly and mindlessly, before he falls asleep that night. 

*

_1934_

By the time Bucky is seventeen, he’s tall, taller than his dad. He’s pushing six feet, and no one can call him chubby anymore, not even Becca, who lives to tease him. He’s still just the slightest bit soft around his belly, not lean and muscled the way some of the boys are – and his cheeks, too, are still full, but it doesn’t matter, not when he smiles just right and makes his dimples pop. 

“Gonna get yourself in trouble with that face,” his ma tells him, cupping his chin. 

“Gonna get a girl in trouble, more like,” Becca says, and Bucky sidles out the door, headed for Steve’s, while his ma is distracted, yelling at Becca for knowing such a thing, let alone saying it. 

Steve isn’t tall. He’s barely over five feet, and Bucky tells him maybe he just ain’t hit his growth spurt yet – he’s a year younger, after all – but they both know it’s a lie. 

The truth is, Bucky’s not sure he wants Steve to grow. He likes the way Steve looks, small and deceptively fragile. 

He likes the way Steve _feels_ , too, his narrow shoulders when Bucky throws his arm over them, his long bony fingers whenever Steve reaches out and touches him, which isn’t often enough.

“Brought you a sandwich,” Bucky say when he lets himself inside Steve’s apartment with the key under the brick. Sarah’s still at work; it will be well after nine before she makes it home, most likely, with circles under her eyes, still pretty but bone tired in a way that makes Bucky’s heart ache to look at her. 

“Here,” he says, holding it out to Steve, who’s sitting at the table, hunched over his sketchpad. 

Steve looks up, eyeing the sandwich—two fat chunks of ham and cheddar cheese slid between thick slices of bread—like he knows Bucky will bitch if he tries to turn it down. He takes a few dutiful bites, but he ends up passing it over to Bucky and going back to work before he even finishes half of it. 

So Bucky flops down on the ratty old sofa and swallows down the rest of it in a few big bites, watching Steve work until he’s bored. 

“Put that away, Michelangelo,” he finally says, flopping over onto his belly. “I’m bored.”

Steve gives him a look, like he’s trying to be annoyed, but Bucky knows better. 

“Come here, pal.” He sits up and pats the sofa cushion beside him. 

When Steve sits down, Bucky shifts until his thigh is pressed up against Steve’s slender leg. 

Presses a little more.

It started last winter, sitting too close like this. 

And then—god—it’s always Steve who turns a little more, until all of a sudden he’s almost—mostly all the way—in Bucky’s lap, facing him. 

They don’t kiss, even though Bucky knows how, even though he’s spent the last two years practicing with any gal that will let him. 

Bucky doesn’t put his hands on Steve’s hips, or his ass, or up high on the inside of his thigh, the way he does the girls who are a little faster, whose families are a little poorer, whose daddies are a little meaner. 

But it doesn’t matter, because Steve pushes right up against him, till his crotch is pressed firm against Bucky’s, and his pale, bony cheekbones are flushed and pink. 

It doesn’t matter that Bucky keeps his hands pinned on the sofa or that Steve lets his dangle down at his sides, awkward and still. 

It doesn’t matter that it only takes a minute or two before it’s all over, just a few desperate presses of their hips, until Steve is biting his lip so hard it bleeds, until Bucky’s hands are shaking, until both of them have sticky wet spots on the front of their trousers and Bucky has to go home later with his shirt untucked or his jacket clutched against his front. 

All that matters is that it happens, and it keeps happening, and Bucky never wants it to stop. 

Becca thinks he’ll get a girl in trouble, but he won’t, because it’s him. He’s the one who’s in trouble, more than he can even wrap his head around. 

*

He’s been in trouble, more or less, since 1934.

The trouble he’s in now is different from the kinds he’d known before. He’d courted trouble once, enjoyed it, treated it as a game, because back then, it hadn’t stuck. His family hadn’t been rich, but their Brooklyn Heights address had been respectable, and he’d benefited from that respectability, carried it with him like a cloak of magical protection into every fight, every ill-advised flirtation, every drag race down Jamaica Bay Boulevard.

Now he’s in a slow, inexorable, creeping kind of trouble, and he’s exhausted from the state of perpetual alertness such trouble demands. Almost, he’d trade it for the hot, immediate tumult of combat, the kind of trouble he was built for. Almost. 

_Not that, not that, not that,_ he thinks. He doesn’t dare, because fighting takes him too close to who he’d been before – and he doesn’t yet know enough about who he is now. 

In the morning, he catches a glimpse of himself in the cracked mirror over the sink. His shoulders have always been broad, but now they’re absolutely huge, and he’s thick all over, his chest stretching the too-small t-shirt, the fabric curving over his middle where it had once hung straight down over a flat belly. His face even looks a little different, fuller, wider across the lower jaw. 

He barely resembles the boy he’d seen in the Smithsonian, the young, carefree Bucky Barnes, who had been Steve Rogers’ best friend, according to the exhibit. 

_Best friends since childhood,_ the recording had said. _Best friends._ That doesn’t quite jive with what he remembers. Doesn’t explain the feelings that well up inside him when he sees Steve’s face in the newspaper, or in a magazine, or on television. 

He opens his diary and flips to the current page, where he’s pasted the most recent of those photos, cut from the glossy insert in the Sunday paper. It’s Steve in his uniform, the helmet obscuring the tousled blonde hair, making the too-pretty face look hard. It’s from an article about an event the papers refer to as The Incident, something to do with an alien invasion of New York City, which Steve Rogers and the Avengers had managed to forestall. There had been an interview with a waitress who’d been in the middle of the battle. “Captain America saved my life,” she’d said. “I’d be dead now if he hadn’t gotten me out of the building when he did.” 

_He saved my life, too,_ was what Bucky had thought, and then the memory had flowed out, unbidden. The Hydra facility, the 107th, the sickness and misery and confusion of the early experiments. Zola. Steve, startling tall and strong and _changed_ , his arm like an iron cable around Bucky’s back as he’d wobbled sickly out of the operating theater. _I’d be dead now if he hadn’t gotten me out of the building when he did. And maybe that would’ve been the best thing for me. For everyone._ He slams the little book shut, grabs a beer out of the fridge, and takes it and a bag of chips out onto the fire escape. He wants the memories, needs them, he knows this. But each new recollection comes with its own, peculiar pain; pain for the boy he had been, the hopes he had dared to cherish, and the terrible years that ruined both the boy and his hopes. He can only take so much. 

Now all he hopes for is a distraction. He watches people walk by on the sidewalk below, tries to lose himself in the repetitive, soothing crunch of the chips, the bite of the dark beer. But the memories of Steve don’t shake easy. 

*

_1936_  


“I swear this thing is rigged,” Bucky says, examining the rifle carefully and frowning at the man behind the counter at the shooting gallery.

“It ain’t,” the man says laconically, smiling at the pretty girl next to Bucky and winking. “You just can’t shoot is all.” 

“Of course he can,” the girl says, loyally. She’s pretty; a redhead whose name seems forever lost to the long, cold years between that sunny summer afternoon and the present. She has freckles on her cheeks, on her shoulders, and a little smattering of them on her chest and across the tops of her breasts, exposed in her light, fluttering sundress. Each one is a perfect, circular dot, as if they’d been dabbed on with a tiny paintbrush dipped in tawny ink. 

Bucky wonders how far down the freckles go, if they disperse below the scooped neck of her dress, or if they continue, speckling her fair skin all the way down. She’d let him find out, if he wanted, and for a fleeting moment, he tries to want it. Tries to be the boy she thinks he is, the one he’s supposed to be. 

“Everyone knows they rig the games,” Steve says, on his other side. “You’re wasting your time, Buck.” 

Bucky smiles down at Steve and shakes his head. “One more try,” he says, nodding at the huge display of stuffed animals pinned to the corkboard behind the rickety little table. “I want that bear, the big one.” 

A little gaggle of spectators has gathered in close around the booth, and they shout jeers and encouragement as he lifts the .22 back up to his shoulder, resting his cheek against the faux walnut stock. He gets seven shots to take out six wooden ducks. In his previous attempts, he’d knocked down three, then five. The gun is sound enough, it shoots more or less straight. He thinks the trick is in the optics, the way the booth is arranged to mislead the eye about the distance between the shooter and the targets. There’s also a slight variation in the rate at which the ducks move around on their loop, so it’s almost impossible to accurately track when the next one will pop up. 

He breathes in slowly, exhales, and fires, taking out the first duck, then the second, then the third. He misses the fourth and pauses, watching the brightly-painted targets teeter past on the rusty conveyor belt. He’s probably overthinking it. 

He lifts the rifle, lets his mind go blank, and fires off the remaining rounds in quick succession, pop-pop-pop.

And all three ducks go down. 

The crowd around him cheers, hands slap him on the back, and the carnie behind the table grudgingly hands over the bear, a huge, powder-blue thing with felt eyes glued unevenly to its plush face. 

“Here ya go.” He shoves the bear into the girl’s arms, grinning, and she takes it, smiling shyly back at him. 

“Thanks, Bucky,” she says breathlessly, and as the little crowd disperses, she lingers, looking at him coyly from beneath her sandy lashes. “That was amazing.” 

“Nah, just got lucky.” 

“None of the other boys have won anything,” she says, gazing up at him, her blue eyes wide with admiration. “And like Steve said, everyone knows they fix it so nobody can win.” 

He could invite her to join him for an ice cream, walk her around the park, find some dark little corner somewhere and probably get to second base. He could ask her out, and she’d say yes, let him kiss her at the movies, maybe let him slide his hand up under her dress. He tries to imagine it, her warm, soft little hands on his chest, the sweet way she’d tilt her head back, her silky red hair sliding through his fingers. 

“You two riding back on the four o’clock?” she asks. “Want to sit with us?” 

He knows he should. But he can feel Steve by his side, standing so close they’re almost touching, and he’s talking before he even thinks about what he’s saying. 

“Spent all my money in the shooting gallery,” he says, with a lopsided smile. “Me and Steve will have to hoof it, doll. You go on ahead.” 

“Oh.” Her face crumples in disappointment, just for a second, before she composes her features into a brave smile. “Well. Maybe I’ll see you around?” 

“Course you will. Hey, maybe I’ll take you and Becca out for a soda or something.” 

Her smile brightens. “Sure. Okay, well, good luck. It’s a long walk.” 

“You just promise to think of me when you cuddle up with this guy tonight,” he says, poking the bear in its fuzzy belly. “And it’ll all be worth it.” 

She laughs, shocked by the sheer cheek of him, and turns to go. “You’re bad, Bucky Barnes,” she says. “I should tell your mother.” 

“You should, she’d get a kick out of it,” he calls after her. 

Once she’s disappeared into the crowd, Steve shoots him a look. “You spent _all_ your money winning that stupid bear?” 

“Nah, I just didn’t feel like riding home on the train,” Bucky answers. “I thought maybe we could get something to eat.” 

They stand in line at the hot dog stand, and Bucky notices that Steve has freckles, too, a little constellation of them across the bridge of his nose. A day in the hot summer sun seems to have done him some good. 

“Four hot dogs, please,” Steve says, pushing the remainder of their money across the counter. “Four?” Bucky asks, eyebrows up. 

“Might as well spend the rest of it. That way it’s not a lie,” Steve says. 

It’s funny, Steve’s peculiar personal code. “You know, if anything Sister Agnes says is right, we’re both going to hell, pal. One little white lie isn’t going to make a difference.” 

“What she says isn’t all right – but it’s not all wrong, either.” 

Bucky knows what Sister Agnes, their doughty old Sunday School teacher, would say to that. _It’s not a buffet. God doesn’t let us pick and choose._ Bucky’s comfortable enough not taking any of it, but he’s always known that Steve has a different, more complicated outlook. 

It’s not worth arguing about, though, so they take their food and sit on the edge of the boardwalk, legs dangling over the side, and eat an early dinner of hot dogs and Coke. Bucky ends up eating three of the hot dogs, pretending not to notice that Steve is watching him as he bolts them down, one after another, in huge, messy bites. For all his scruples about truth-telling, Bucky thinks, Steve sure doesn’t seem to take issue with gluttony.

He’s so full afterward, he can hardly drag himself into the paneled wagon of the slow-rolling ice truck, and he grunts with the slight effort of pulling Steve up after him. They sit close together, backs to the ice, the sun on their faces, the heat of Steve’s little body pressed close to Bucky’s side. He smells like the beach, his blowing hair giving off the scent of sun and sand and fried fair food, and Bucky breathes in as deep as he can, taking it in. 

“Can’t believe you made me eat all those hot dogs,” he says, nudging Steve in the ribs. This isn’t exactly true; Steve’s always pushing food at him, but whenever Bucky says anything about it, Steve blushes a little, and he likes to see that. 

True to form, Steve blushes. “I can’t believe we didn’t just take the train.” 

“Didn’t want to spend the whole ride flirting with a bunch of girls.” 

“I know. But – I wouldn’t have cared, Buck.” He lets his knee bump up against Bucky’s, joins his hand with Bucky’s, between their bodies, where no one can see. 

“I know,” Bucky says. His heart stutters a little as Steve moves his hand to Bucky’s thigh. 

They do this sometimes, flirting with their attraction in public, albeit only when nobody’s looking. Steve seems to like tempting Bucky when he knows there’s nothing either of them can do about it, and it makes Bucky crazy – but he’s always known he can afford to push against his boundaries, to transgress a little. He tells himself he can always step back over the line if things get too deep. 

This thing with Steve is fathoms deep, and he still hasn’t stepped back. 

It’s not like it is with girls. Girls are not completely without allure for Bucky; he likes women, likes talking to them, likes touching them and kissing them, but there’s a soft, secret place inside him that they can never touch, a part of himself that he always holds back. He can’t do that with Steve, and he doesn’t know why, and it’s as frightening as it is irresistible. 

Bucky turns to look at him, meets his big, sober blue eyes, and then, because he wants to and nobody’s looking, he closes his mouth over Steve’s, wraps his arms around his skinny shoulders and pulls him close. Steve’s hand tightens on his thigh, and Bucky’s almost instantly hard, and has to pull away, gasping, just to catch his breath. He feels reckless, out of control, and god, if only Steve were a _girl,_ everything would be so easy, so safe – but then, he might not feel like this, like he’s walking a tightrope over a bottomless pit, like he’s in a speeding car with no brakes. 

“Want you, Bucky,” Steve whispers into his neck, and then they’re kissing again. 

Steve’s body shivers in his grasp, and his lips are soft, and Bucky thinks how easy it is, wanting Steve. And how dangerous. Maybe not so much for him, with his easy way with girls, with his good family and his strong body, a multi-layered bulwark against all threats. But for Steve – already bullied and belittled and terribly, recklessly brave – this is nothing but trouble. 

Sooner or later, it’s going to catch up with them. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky learns to be in his body, with interesting results.

Bucky reads an article in a magazine, one of those glossy self-help rags that seem to be very popular in the 21st century, and it says one way to deal with anxiety is to “Be In Your Body.” He’s not entirely sure what that means; it’s vague in the way that much of the “advice” in the magazine is, but it sort of makes sense.

When he was the Soldier, he was in his body but not really in it. It was an awful, nauseating feeling, to be in a passenger in his own body. 

So yes, he can sort of see the wisdom in the comfort of physicality. The magazine spouts a lot of stuff about “intentional breathing” and “mindful existence,” but Bucky figures what it really boils down to is that it feels good to do things that feel good, to remind yourself that your body is yours. 

That’s what food has come to be for him. That and distraction. It passes the time—something of which he often has too much—to go out and get a hot meal, bring it back to his little apartment and unpack it. A ritual with a warm, comforting conclusion. It’s especially useful in the evening hours, when he is more likely to get lost in shaky memories. It helps if he has a beer or three, a bag of chips or a couple of sugary-sweet candy bars. The physical experience of satiety, of fullness, maybe of slightly over-fullness. 

So yes, Bucky gets why he should Be In His Body, even if the article was mostly worthless. 

In fact, it’s that maxim that he has in mind when he props himself up against the wall on his mattress, legs sprawled out before him, and slips the button on his jeans. 

It’s an instant relief, parting the tabs on his increasingly snug jeans and being able to take a deep breath, but that isn’t what compels him to do it. 

He wants a different physical sensation, something besides the taste of chocolate or the feeling of a full belly. 

As the Soldier, he didn’t jerk off. Period. 

That wasn’t part of Hydra’s protocol, and there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for it, anyway. When he was awake, he had orders with which to comply. 

That wasn’t to say that sex wasn’t part of those orders. Sometimes it was. The Soldier was attractive for a reason – they’d removed the hair from his chest and his belly, shaved his cheeks, strapped him into leather and buckles that were menacing, sure, but were sexual, too, suggestive and dangerously appealing. 

This now—the idea of touching himself, just because he wants to, just because it will feel good—is nothing like that. He hasn’t done this since he was with Steve, during the War. Before he fell. 

He can’t think about that. _Can’t think about the train can’t think about the train can’t think about the train._

*

_1935_

It’s late, long past the time he should have been asleep, and the apartment is quiet, his parents and sisters sleeping. Bucky slides his hand down, under the sheet, over the soft skin of his belly, holding his breath a little. 

When he wraps his hand around his cock, he plays the same game he always plays – seeing how long he can go before he thinks about Steve. 

First he thinks about the girl in the apartment below the Barnes’. She’s sixteen, lithe and doe-eyed, too shy to say much to Bucky but always looking after him when he passes. She’s pretty in a forgettable way, which makes him feel like a heel.

Then it’s the girl in the apartment above theirs, a few years older than Bucky, newly married and sweetly curved in all the right places, with high full breasts that pull her blouses tight and a gap between her teeth that is more alluring than it probably should be.

Neither one of them hold his attention for long.

It’s not that he doesn’t like thinking of them. He does. But when his grip tightens, when he moves his hand faster, more than just a lazy down stroke, they disappear from his mind like vapor over a steam grate.

In their place is the same person who’s always there, his bony narrow shoulders and narrow little jaw. _Steve_.

Steve, who grinds on his lap until they’re both gasping, until it’s hard to breathe or focus or exist at all. Steve, who makes him come just pressing up against him. Steve, who has never kissed him, or touched his cock, or held his hand. 

When he thinks about Steve like this, he thinks about what it might be like to turn him over, carefully, so carefully, and cover him up, Bucky’s sturdy front pressed up against Steve’s fragile back, pressing forward until Bucky’s _inside him_ , the way Bucky knows boys can do. He’s heard things, seen the fairy boys in the alleys who look sort of like Steve, except they have to work to be beautiful and delicate and Steve just wakes up that way, effortless. Gorgeous.

God, what it might feel like to be inside him, against him, held together, Steve’s little body cradled under Bucky’s bigger one. 

God, god, _god_.

He claps his left hand over his mouth before he comes, bites down on the soft flesh of his palm to keep himself quiet. 

Steve always looks a little pained, a little guilty, when he’s finished grinding up on Bucky’s lap, when they’re both sticky and uncomfortable. Bucky doesn’t feel guilty, though. He doesn’t feel guilty at all. 

*

At first, Bucky doesn’t think of anything. Just concentrates on what it feels like, his hand on his dick.

His right hand. He’d briefly considered the left, wondered if its slick metal grip would feel like a stranger’s touch, and discarded the idea. He doesn’t _want_ it to feel like someone else’s hand. 

It’s not easy, though, to think of nothing. That’s not, typically speaking, how this works. 

Bucky looks down at himself, at his hand and his cock and the surprisingly soft curve of his belly, and tries to concentrate on how it feels. He’s supposed to Be In His Body. 

All he can think of, though, is Steve. 

His brain— _still a little scrambled_ , his interior voice pipes up before he can stop it—can’t seem to decide how to code Steve, how to picture him now. In one moment he’s the small, beautiful man Bucky remembers from Brooklyn, vulnerable and vicious at once, so pretty it makes Bucky’s chest ache. In the next moment, though, he’ll morph into the next Steve, the Steve he’d been after the serum, the Steve he is now. Big, impossibly big and muscled and powerful.

Big. Steve is big now. 

Bucky looks down at himself again, at the way his jeans are shoved down on his thick thighs, the way his broad waist and soft belly match the hulking shoulders he sees in the mirror. 

Steve is big, but Bucky is still bigger. 

Not the way he’d been before the war, when Steve had been tiny and Bucky had sometimes looked at him and wished he were a gal, just because it would solve so many problems. Just because Bucky would have loved it, making an honest woman of Steve, putting a ring on his long, graceful finger and then taking care of him, being the man of the house and bringing a paycheck home every Friday night, fucking the bejeezus out of his pretty little wife till the apartment was overrun with pretty blue-eyed boys and sassy girls with china doll complexions. It had made Bucky happy and heartbroken at the same time, looking at Steve’s waspish waist and narrow shoulders, imagining how different it could be, if only. 

It’s different now. Steve would never be mistaken for a girl, and it doesn’t seem to matter as much in this century, anyway – two men are allowed to fuck, or be in love, or walk down the street holding hands, brazen as you please. 

But Bucky’s still bigger, and Steve’s waist is still narrow, so narrow Bucky could still wrap his hands around it, maybe, could still pull his Stevie down on his lap and hold him close, like he was precious, like he was made of glass. 

He could—oh god, oh, _fuck_ \--still cover Steve up with his own body, till they were pressed together everywhere, Bucky’s thick muscle and softening bulk shoved up tight against Steve’s taut body. 

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. 

When he comes, it’s with his left hand clapped over his mouth. 

It feels good. It feels really, really good, and if his only blanket is messy now, come-splattered and sticky? He doesn’t care. 

But he should. Oh, he should. He should care because this is trouble, this is everything he’s in Bucharest to avoid. 

This is a rabbit hole he can’t fall down, no matter how Steve had looked when Bucky had tried to tell him he was just another mission, no matter how he’d felt in the Potomac. 

This is trouble that Bucky can no longer afford to court. 

*

The Dâmbovița River flows smoothly through the city in a manmade channel, its blue-green waters calmed by several canal locks, but whenever Bucky looks at its sedate surface, he thinks about the rushing, unruly waters of the Potomac. He thinks about the way Steve had looked, battered and resigned, staggering a little as he’d let his shield fall into the murky depths.

He thinks about Steve in Brooklyn, Steve when he was small and dying, Steve on the bridge, his defenses dropped, the look on his face when he’d said Bucky’s name. He thinks about Steve’s unconscious form lying helpless before him on the sandy bank of the Potomac. Perhaps he should have killed him then, and saved himself a world of trouble. 

Sometimes he wishes he had. 

For now, he just wishes he could cast his memories into the sluggish water, let them drift to the bottom of the Dâmbovița and sink down deep in the silty bottom, where they couldn’t trouble him any longer. 

But no; he has to Be In His Body, has to let the memories come, try to reconcile who he _was_ with who he _is._

The problem with Being In His Body, though, is that his body is damned uncooperative. Now that he’s given in to it a little, it seems to expect him to go on giving in. Ideas rise up out of nowhere. _Think of Steve,_ they say, and _touch me,_ and _more._

When he gets back to the safehouse, he writes _Do not think about fucking Steve Rogers_ in his notebook, and of course, he immediately thinks about fucking Steve Rogers. 

*

_1943_

The War is a time of firsts for Bucky. 

There’s the first time he kills a man, puts a bullet in his lung and watches him crumple around the bullet’s entry point, blood pouring over his hands and out of his mouth. There’s the first time he knows what it is to be cold; not just a brief winter chill between heated buildings, but the bone-deep, unshakable cold that makes his ears ache and his teeth chatter behind his chapped, blue lips. The first time he knows real hunger, after six months on K-rations, fantasizing about warm, homemade bread, hot coffee with cream, and fried dough with powdered sugar until it nearly brings him to tears. 

There’s the first time he sees Steve, changed, and it changes Bucky, too. 

But there’s never any time to talk about it. 

It’s a freezing night in the Alps, and Bucky is wrapped in a thin, rough wool blanket inside his pup tent, shivering in the miserable half-doze that is as close as he can get to sleep. It’s been this way ever since he left the Hydra facility, and he wonders what’s wrong with him, but he doesn’t dare mention it to anyone.

He shivers, squeezes his eyes shut, and tries to let himself sink into something like sleep. 

And then he’s not alone, not as cold, and wide awake. 

They never talk on nights like this; Steve is just there, and they don’t talk about any of it; what Hydra did to Bucky, what the Army did to Steve, the way things have changed for both of them. 

Now, there’s never any question of his being in his body; Bucky _is_ his body, in the way of any healthy young animal. When his body is hungry and cold, _he_ is hungry and cold, and the excitement, panic and longing he feels when he awakes to find Steve beside him pulse through him with the brisk immediacy of blood delivering oxygen. 

He touches the warm flesh of Steve’s narrow hips with cold fingertips, pulling him closer, and Steve buries his head under Bucky’s chin, breath hot on Bucky’s chest. They stay like this for a long time, close, the boundless heat of Steve’s new, bigger body seeping into Bucky, the air in the tent slowly warming, legs tangling, pressed together so hard it hurts, and god, _everything_ hurts, Bucky’s body, his brain, his heart, all of it, and there’s a frantic shuffle as their hands find buttons, fingers work clasps and clothes are torn roughly away. Steve kisses him, long and slow, and then his mouth and hands are on his chest, his belly, between his legs, and Bucky’s gasping, throat burning with everything he’s never, ever going to say. 

Steve’s hands grip Bucky’s hips, Bucky tangles his fingers in Steve’s hair, and Bucky is excruciatingly aware of all the places where they touch, skin to skin, hot and soft. His cock slides inside Steve’s hot, wet mouth, and he bites down on the musty wool blanket to stifle his groan. Then Steve starts to move, tongue sliding smooth and firm along the underside of his cock, and it takes him apart.

It’s nothing at all like the times back home in Brooklyn, Steve’s light, fragile frame on his lap, and it’s exactly like those times, the frantic ache of it, the sudden rush of needy urgency, the pleasurable burn that builds and builds with every slide into Steve’s pliant, willing mouth. 

There’s the awful push-pull of _don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him, it’s Steve and I’ll never, ever hurt him_ and the subtle, wicked drive to tighten his fingers in Steve’s hair, slam into him harder and harder, to let go and pound into him, because he’s not fragile, he can take it, he can take it and take it, he _wants it like this,_ rough and hard and demanding, and look at him, he’s made for it, his shoulders impossibly wide, his back a topographical map of muscle and sinew and bone. 

As much as he’d loved Steve’s flawed, almost feminine delicacy, he loves the unmistakably masculine shape of him, the strength and resiliency of this new form. And that frightens Bucky more than Hydra ever had, because loving Steve when he was small and fragile and doomed had been one thing, but this is another. 

Steve still isn’t afraid. Or – if he is – he doesn’t let it stop him from doing exactly what he thinks he needs to do, whether that’s confronting a bully in a garbage-strewn alley, facing down Hydra at the gates of their own bases, or slipping into Bucky’s tent and making love to him with a passionate abandon that shocks Bucky with its intensity. 

Steve moans soft in the back of his throat, and Bucky loses his grip on his mind for a minute as Steve’s mouth tightens around Bucky’s cock. He has to bite back a cry because he’s that good, Steve is, he’s the best Bucky’s ever had, so sweet and hot for him, and god, it’s good to be with him, even like this, sneaking around in the freezing dark.

“That’s good, baby, that’s so good,” Bucky whispers, his voice shaking, his body urging him to _go faster_ but he tries so hard to hold back, to make it last a little longer, because it could be the last time. It could always be the last time. 

But he’s never really been able to hold back when it comes to Steve. He lets go, biting his lip, hard, to keep from shouting. He comes and comes, his whole body jerking with the force of it, and when he’s done, Steve pulls him close, the hard length of him wet and insistent against Bucky’s belly, and they finish slow, eyes locked in the dark, close as a secret, until Steve’s body shakes and trembles in his arms, he lets go with a rush, and they end as they’d begun, with Steve’s head tucked under Bucky’s chin, the solid hammer of his heart pounding into Bucky’s chest like an unstoppable piston. 

Bucky lies there quietly, thinking how crazy this is, fighting a war side by side with his lover. Because even if they win, they won’t win, and if they lose, they lose everything. 

*

He stops to buy a pizza at a food truck outside the Promenada shopping center, sits down and eats it in steady, determined bites. When it’s gone, he goes back to the truck and orders again, _sarmale_ this time, with a side of spicy fried potatoes and a bottle of Coke.

The woman in the truck calls him _dragule_ , but Bucky doesn’t worry, because she’d called everyone in line something like that. Dear, darling, sweetie, honey. It doesn’t mean she remembers him from the last time he’d been here, two weeks ago. He keeps his head down and his hood up, avoiding eye contact. 

But then, as she hands him his food, she winks and asks him if he’s remembered to bring his cotton, _this time._

“Cotton,” he says, momentarily baffled by the _non-sequitur._

“For your ears,” she says, miming putting something into each ear. “For the subway.” 

Which means she does remember him, and had even noticed that he’d gone into the subway station across the street. Which means he can’t come here again. 

“I have some,” he mutters, taking the bag and handing over a stack of bills. Romanians have a kind of national mania about cross-breezes, some superstition about illness entering the body through the ears. Whenever he descends into the subway tunnel, the commuters around him stuff little wads of cotton wool into their ears before the air stirred up by the passage of trains whooshes by. He usually remembers, but he’d forgotten once, and as he’d feared, it had made him stand out, made him memorable. 

He takes his food and walks in the opposite direction, away from the subway station. He claims a park bench and opens the box of fragrant food, trying to lose himself in it. 

It’s good - the cabbage rolls are stuffed with fatty pork and savory sausage, smothered in spicy tomato sauce and resting on a bed of rich polenta with peppers. The uncomfortable fullness he feels as he works through his meal is good, too. His body is so preoccupied with digesting the shocking quantity of food, he can’t think about Steve, about how his hot skin had felt under the rough palms of his hands, about the little sounds he’d made, about the way he’d laced their hands together when it was over, tracing little circles on the back of Bucky’s hand with the soft pad of his thumb. 

Had it even been real? 

Had any of it been real? 

_Don’t think about that,_ he tells himself, and he tries to redirect his attention to the food in front of him. Cabbage rolls. Think about those.

And he does. 

*

_1936_

Sarah sets the two plates down on the table and excuses herself, smiling and calm, but Bucky can hear her coughing in the small back bedroom, coughing like she might never stop. 

He looks down at his plate. She’d made cabbage rolls, one of Steve’s favorite dishes, in honor of his birthday, but these aren’t really up to par. The cabbage is soggy and sulfurous, the filling more oatmeal than hamburger, and the rolls are smothered, for want of anything else, in creamed corn. But as Depression fare goes, it’s not awful, and Bucky digs in, determined to do right by the woman who’d spent the time preparing the meal. 

“She’s knows she’s a better nurse than she is a cook,” Steve whispers to Bucky, pushing his barely-touched food around on the plate. “You don’t have to eat them _all,_ she won’t mind.” 

Bucky disagrees. 

“’oo gonna eat ‘ose?” Bucky asks around a huge mouthful of cabbage and oatmeal, pointing at Steve’s remaining food with his fork. Steve shakes his head and pushes the toward Bucky, the look on his face simultaneously scandalized and impressed. 

Wanting to impress him more, Bucky proceeds to eat every roll on his plate, too. 

Doing this – making Steve laugh, distracting him – also serves to distract Bucky from the fact that Sarah Rogers is dying. Her pretty angel’s face is thinner and paler every time he sees her, the bouts of breathless coughing last longer. As she gets worse, she looks more and more like Steve, and Bucky doesn’t like it at all. 

They don’t talk about it, as if denying it words somehow makes it less real. 

He distracts himself with food, with lighthearted silliness, and Steve is laughing at him, shaking his head. “You’re probably the only person in Brooklyn who’s gonna manage to get fat during the Depression,” he says, leaning over to poke Bucky in the belly. 

“Good thing you like me that way,” Bucky says, catching Steve’s hand and holding it. “Isn’t it?” 

“I like you any which way, Buck,” Steve says, softly. “You know that.” 


	3. Chapter 3

There’s a feeling, deep in his spine, a creeping sense of dread. It’s a slow, full-body sensation, an ancient kind of knowing that feels primordial: the moment when a predator realizes it’s also prey.

Bucky feels that way now, for the first time since he’s been in Bucharest. 

It feels like something, _someone_ , is coming. Like he knows it in his bones.

Bucky isn’t sure if he’s always been this way, or if it is a gift from Hydra, a sixth sense that the soldier would have used in the field. He thinks, though, that maybe this is learned behavior, a skillset he developed before Hydra ever set eyes on him. 

*

_1942_

The first few months in the Army are both much worse than Bucky could have imagined and slightly better.

It’s terrible, sure, worse in more ways that Bucky could ever have imagined without living it. There’s no way to prepare for it, for the constant, screaming kind of horror that rings all around him, as omnipresent as oxygen. And, then, there’s the casual closeness of death, the nauseating realization that _he_ is the reason other human beings are dying, are dead, are leaving their families to grieve for husbands and sons and brothers. Even Nazi families mourn, he guesses. 

The worst part, though, worse than death or cold or endless, terrifying nights when sleep never comes, is the specter of those things. The ceaseless anxiety of the battlefield, the constant buzzing wariness that never leaves his bones, never lets him truly sleep, never lets him take a full breath. The constant, grinding knowledge that the worst is yet to come, that something terrible lurks just around the bend. The war, for Bucky, is living with a monster in constant pursuit, always fleeing, always looking over his shoulder. 

War means watching. Always watching.

Even so, it’s not as bad as it will get. Not then, not before Azzano, before Zola, before Bucky’s body and mind and everything get scrambled up. Before everything changes, changes utterly, _and a terrible beauty is born_. Bucky wasn’t, strictly speaking, much for poetry, but that’s a line that had stuck with him. He’d even had a battered copy of Yeats that he’d read in school and held onto, even when it’d gotten him into a fight once, gotten him accused of being a “sentimental Mick,” which he guesses Yeats was, too. 

But before that, before Hydra remakes him, terrible and beautiful, there is just the war. And the war, at first, is the kind of hell that you thought maybe you could still escape from, when you could still laugh with your friends at night, spout bullshit together and pretend none of you were afraid until maybe, for a little while, you weren’t. 

He spends evenings huddled together in tight spaces, cupping his hand around the glowing end of a cigarette, enjoying the easy camaraderie of soldiers, laughter and gentle harassment. 

He spends evenings listening as they tell him stories about their gals back home, and he tells them about Steve, and he is wary then, too, carefully editing until he’s a she, until it’s fine, until it’s just like them, and it’s okay. It’s okay. 

He learns how to be careful, how to survive. 

*

When the feeling comes over Bucky again in Bucharest, the feeling that something is coming, he tries to ignore it.

He doesn’t _want_ anything to come. Doesn’t want his careful routine to shatter, doesn’t want the illusion of safety that he’s created here to disappear. 

He throws himself into distractions. H eats more, until the seams of his jeans are straining and a little roll of fat spills over his waistband, uncomfortably tight. He writes more, poring over his notebook, making endless lists and notes to himself. He walks more, disappearing down the city’s back alleys for hours at a time, wandering. 

He jerks off more, losing himself in the distance of his memories of Steve and the immediacy of his orgasms. Losing himself in the strange contrast between then and now that he finds whenever he wraps his hand around his cock and closes his eyes. 

*

_1938_

Steve is the one who demands it, when it finally happens.

“We don’t have to,” Bucky insists, the way he has been insisting for months now. 

Steve’s jaw ticks, and Bucky can see his teeth grinding, can see Steve bracing his tiny body for battle. “Yes. We do.”

Bucky sighs, pulling Steve closer on the couch, tugging him over until Steve’s straddling him, feeling light as air on Bucky’s strong thighs. “If we gotta do it, then you do me,” he says, the way he’s already said it a dozen times before. 

It’s not that he doesn’t want to fuck Steve. He does. _God_ , he does. He wants to cover him up, lay his own sturdy body over Steve’s narrow frame, wants to push against him, bury himself in Steve’s body, _claim_ him. God, he wants to. 

But Steve is thinner than ever, prone to coughing fits, and his chest rattles at night when they sleep, Steve’s little body tucked up next to Bucky, his knobby spine pressing almost painfully against the soft pooch of Bucky’s tummy. Bucky would rather die than hurt him. 

“I don’t wanna do you,” Steve says, mulish as he always is. 

Bucky smiles, slow and charming the way he knows Steve likes, and then bites his lip in mock distress. “Gonna hurt my feelings, darling, saying things like that.” 

Steve is having none of it. “You know what I mean, Buck. You know.” 

And yes. Bucky does know. Knows that Steve wants Bucky pushed up inside him just the way Bucky wants to _be_ pushed up inside him. He also knows that Steve isn’t half as strong as he pretends to be. 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Bucky says, knowing it’s going to infuriate Steve even as the words are leaving his mouth. 

“I’m not made of fucking glass, Bucky,” Steve says, the profanity carefully enunciated, lest Bucky not notice it. 

Bucky shoves a hand through his hair, frustrated. Steve _is_ made of glass, is the thing. He is fragile and delicate, the most precious thing in Bucky’s world. 

He opens his mouth, starts to speak, but Steve senses a weakness and pounces. “Just let me try, Buck. Let me try.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “Try what?”

Steve smiles a little, and Christ, he looks like his dead ma, and Bucky swallows hard. 

“Let me”—Steve pauses, gesturing down at Bucky’s lap—“let me be on top of you, like this.” He bounces lightly and grinds down on Bucky’s dick, which is already at half-mast, traitor that it is. “If it hurts, I’ll stop. I swear, Buck. I swear.”

There is precious little in this world that Bucky has ever denied Steve, and he can feel himself nodding before he even makes a conscious decision to acquiesce. 

“Yeah. Okay, but you promise me,” he says, even though Steve is already scrambling off his lap and retrieving the little jar of Vaseline from their bedroom, looking fey and pleased with himself and not at all concerned about Bucky’s crisis of conscience. “Promise you’ll stop if it hurts.”

Steve nods, and Bucky knows he’s lying, just like he knows he’s going to let Steve have his way. 

Bucky kisses him forever, kisses him till their mouths hurt, till his lips are chapped and his balls ache and Steve’s pretty cock is leaking all over Bucky’s belly. 

He’s stalling, and it’s always like this with Steve. Bucky is always torn between wanting to protect him and ruin him, between wanting to wrap him in cotton for safekeeping and wanting to drag him down and dirty him up, tug his soft blond hair and mark his pretty china doll skin. Between pushing Steve down and holding him still and lying back himself, letting Steve do what he will. 

When it finally happens, when Steve lowers himself carefully down onto Bucky’s cock, Bucky is shaking as much as Steve is. More. 

“You’re so big, oh god oh god oh _god,/i >,” Steve mumbles, holding himself up with his hands on Bucky’s shoulders, sliding down on careful inch at a time. _

“Christ, Steve, god, honey.” Bucky can hear his mouth running, can’t seem to get control of it, can’t seem to do anything but sit there, frozen, shaking against the pressure to move, to thrust his hips up. “Are you okay, baby?”

“Shut up, Buck,” Steve says, sassy like he always is, like he’s not holding Bucky’s heart in his hands. “I’m fine.”

And he is. It’s Bucky who feels like he might die when Steve slides down those last few inches, until his pert little ass is flush against Bucky’s lap, until Bucky’s buried inside him to the hilt and Steve’s cock is pushed up against Bucky’s stomach and Steve’s shamelessly grinding it against the sensitive soft skin of his lower belly with every thrust. 

“You’re so big, you feel so big,” Steve keeps mumbling, clinging to Bucky’s shoulders, his sharp blue eyes locked on Bucky’s, too brave to look away. 

Steve comes first, and even then he doesn’t blink. He’s always brave, braver than Bucky, he always has been. 

When Bucky comes, too, it feels like Steve has willed it, like he’s pulled the orgasm out of Bucky on a string. 

“I told you. I told you it would be fine,” Steve says breathlessly, whispering the words against the shell of Bucky’s ear. 

Deep, deep down, though, in some part of himself that Bucky can’t quite access yet, he thinks Steve is wrong. Even then, some part of Bucky knows that it’s not fine. It’s not.

*

It’s almost noon by the time Bucky gets himself cleaned up, pulls on his clothes – layer after layer, t-shirt and henley and hoodie, a ball cap pulled low over his eyes until he feels covered, protected.

He ambles toward one of the busier streets, just a few blocks from the safe house. It’s cloudy, a chill in the air, and the streets are busy, people out to buy their lunch or get coffee; it feels good, disappearing into the buzz of the city. 

He plans to hit a food truck at some point—he wants one of the pretzels they sell on the corner, huge and crispy on the outside, soft dough in the middle—but he ends up stopping at the market to buy fruit, a bag of soft black plums, just because they look good, just because he’s supposed to Be in His Body and because he wants them when he sees them. Because they feel ripe but firm even under the metal fingers of his left hand, and because he’s supposed to do things that feel good. 

As he reaches forward to take them, thanking the grocer—“ _multumesc_ ,” a pretty word murmured in a language that he speaks flawlessly but cannot remember learning—the whisper of anxiety in his spine flares again. The fissure of danger, the uncanny itch of being watched. 

He cuts his eyes up, sharp, and looks around for the trouble that he has always known is coming. 

*

Bucky’s whole body buzzes with commingled disappointment and relief. Disappointment, because it’s not Steve who’s tracked him down. Steve would approach him directly, one-on-one, and the newsagent wouldn’t be looking at Bucky like that, nervous and edgy, like he thinks he recognizes him, like he’s afraid. Whatever’s happening, Bucky’s cover has been blown wide open, and Steve wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.

Then there’s the relief, which flows from the same source. It isn’t Steve. Bucky won’t have to look at him and lie, won’t have to pretend he doesn’t remember. Won’t have to crack open Steve’s heart to keep from crushing it altogether. 

He turns, slowly, and walks away from the safehouse, aimless, trying to give himself space to think. Someone could be watching him already. Do they know about the safehouse? No, it doesn’t make sense – if they knew where he was, they’d have been there by now, wouldn’t have bothered with the newspaper story. 

The newspaper story. A bombing, attributed to him. The grainy picture above the fold, underneath the blaring headline.

The man in the picture does resemble the Winter Soldier, but Bucky had left him behind two years ago, and he’s changed since then. Bucky’s a solid forty pounds heavier, for one thing; his hair is longer, the shape of his face fuller. Anyone who bothered to compare him to the photo in the paper would see that. _Not that it would matter,_ he reminds himself. _You didn’t do this bombing in Vienna, but you did plenty of other things, and no matter why they’re looking for you now, if they find you…_

If they find him, they won’t care about clearing up the misunderstanding, and he can’t blame them. 

If they find him, he’s as good as dead. 

*

_1945_

“You ever think about what’ll happen? After?” 

“After what?” Bucky asks, his hand stopping mid-caress at Steve’s temple. They’re lying close together on a hay-filled mattress inside an abandoned hut in the foothills of the Alps. They’d left the others behind at camp, come ahead to scout out the territory ahead. It’s the first time they’ve been alone together for months. 

“After the war. If we make it.” 

Bucky scoots away, props his head on his hand and looks at Steve, bemused. “We’ll go home,” he says. “Back to Brooklyn.” 

“No, I know, but that’s not what I meant.” Steve says. “I mean, what’ll happen to _us._ ” 

“You’re gonna marry Peggy Carter and have a hundred kids, probably,” Bucky says, trying to smile, to make light of the moment, even though his mouth doesn’t seem to want to smile, even though his heart gives a sharp pang, just thinking about it. “And hell – since you left, there hasn’t been a guy worth marrying in Brooklyn for three years. I like my chances.” 

“Bucky,” Steve says, rolling onto his back and shoving a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I want.” 

They’ve been dancing around this for months- hell, for years – and Bucky still can’t think of a single way to talk about it that won’t make both of them miserable. Steve is constitutionally incapable of accepting the idea that there are some odds he can’t beat.

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky and neither of us will make it,” he says, pulling Steve close, pressing soft kisses to his cheek, his ear, his throat. 

“Don’t say that,” Steve says. “Don’t.” 

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Bucky says, pulling away again. “That’s how it is, baby.” 

“Before the war -” 

“Before the war…” Bucky sighs, exasperated, not wanting to say it, but not seeing any way around it. “Before the war, you were sick. You were dying – no, don’t give me that bullshit, you were. You were.” He tries to make the words gentle, cupping Steve’s face in his hand. “You were dying, and we were kids, and…I don’t know. It was the only chance we were ever going to have.”

“But now I’m not dying,” Steve says. “And we have another chance.” 

“Now you’re not dying, but you’re Captain fucking America, and if you’ve got any brains to go with all these muscles, you’ll go marry your pretty English sweetheart the second we win this fucking war,” Bucky tells him. “There’s no other way. We get a little time, this, right now, and then…that’s it.” 

“What if neither of us married anyone?” Steve asks, quiet and serious. “What if we just go on, like this?” 

“And when someone figures it out?” 

“Wouldn’t matter,” Steve says. “Not to me.”

“Wouldn’t matter,” Bucky says, with a dry laugh. “Right. Getting that dishonorable discharge would be nothing. Being publicly disgraced, not being able to find work. God, my parents. My sister.” He manages, just, to bite back the rest. _Easy for you to say,_ he thinks. _Your family’s gone, you’re physically indestructible._

“Maybe it wouldn’t be like that,” Steve says. “Maybe you’re not giving people enough credit.” 

_Maybe you’re giving them too much,_ Bucky thinks. “Maybe,” is all he says, leaning down again to kiss Steve on his square chin, his soft mouth. “Maybe.” He goes on kissing him, shutting him up the only way he knows how. 

It’s not like it used to be, back home, when he’d worried about breaking Steve’s fragile body, hurting him. With a deep, burning shame, he realizes that he _wants_ to hurt Steve, a little, wants to bring him down to earth, make him feel something. Wants to watch him take his cock, all of it, hard and fast, wants to watch his mouth open and his head fall back, neck arching, wants to watch him gasp for it, wants to make him beg. 

He rolls on top of Steve, pulling one leg up over his shoulder and opening him up, slow, slower than he ever has, so slow it’s hard for even him to take, his cock hard and aching, so slow he almost gives in before Steve does. 

“Bucky,” Steve says, “Now – now, _oh_ -” But Bucky just keeps fucking him slowly with his fingers. “Ask me nice,” he murmurs. “Ask me nice and I’ll give it to you.” 

“Please,” Steve whispers, “Please – I want you, _please_ , Buck.” 

And then Bucky is inside him, and they both get what they want, for a little while. 

*

Afterward, when they’re lying still and spent in each other’s arms, Steve says, “I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

Bucky makes a noncommittal noise, stroking his hand along Steve’s ribs, to his nipped-in little waist, to his narrow hips. 

“Would you promise me something?” “Anything.” 

“If we make it through…you’ll think about it. That’s all.” 

Bucky leans forward to kiss the nape of his neck, where the fine blonde hair is darker, and grows into a tiny point. “If we make it through…I’ll think about it,” he says. “I promise.” 

*

_2014_

He pulls Rogers onto the riverbank, checks his breathing, and rocks back on his heels in the sand. Alive. He’s alive, and he knows the Solider – Bucky, he’d said his name was. _Bucky, you’ve known me your entire life. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes…I’m not gonna fight you. You’re my friend._

He could stay here, wait for Rogers to wake up, ask him things, find out more. Part of him wants to think it’s a lie, but he knows it’s not, can feel the truth of it, shaking the very foundations of his understanding. 

But there, a shadow looming over everything, is the deep pull of the mission. Rogers is breathing, and he shouldn’t be. _You’re my friend._ But he- Bucky? The Soldier? – doesn’t have anything to offer a friend, not anymore. 

He walks away. 

*

He returns to the safehouse via a circuitous route, and doesn’t enter through the main entrance, but instead heads down the alley and ascends the fire escape. There are things in the apartment that he wants, things it had probably been stupid to leave behind.

He reaches his floor, approaches the apartment’s rear door. 

And stops. 

A shadow moves inside, the shadow of a man. 

The windows are covered with newspapers, but there’s a small hole in one section, a place where he can look inside, unseen, if he’s careful. 

It’s Steve. Alone – or at least, he’s the only one inside the apartment. _Steve._ Right now, with everything falling apart around him, Bucky is wholly In His Body. His body, that remembers holding Steve by his fragile, bony little shoulders; his body, that remembers those same shoulders, broader and infinitely stronger, supporting him as they fled the Hydra facility. His body, which remembers everything now, all of it, every touch, every kiss, every moment of terrified, hopeless longing. 

He opens the door and steps inside, moves soundlessly into the room. Steve’s back is turned, and he’s flipping through Bucky’s most recent journal. He pauses on the picture from the magazine, one long, slim finger tracing over the image of his own face, and Bucky’s heart feels like it might break. Why is he here? Whatever is happening, Bucky can’t see his way to a single positive outcome. The best case scenario is for him to lie low until the world figures out what really happened in Vienna, until the furor dies down a little, but even that pathetic sliver of hope seems wildly unattainable right now. Steve being here accomplishes nothing but putting Steve in danger, which was the exact thing Bucky had been trying to avoid, all this time. 

Bucky suddenly feels angry, furiously angry. _You goddamn idiot,_ he thinks. _Never did know when to quit._

Steve seems to sense his presence and turns, the open journal still held lightly in his hand. Their eyes meet and hold. Steve’s face, despite the concealing helmet, seems naked, and a flurry of emotions flickers by in an instant. Relief, happiness, disappointment, confusion, fear. Bucky tries to keep his own face still, revealing nothing. Because Steve can’t see – Bucky can’t afford for him to see – all those same feeling stirring just beneath the surface. 

Steve looks him up and down, quickly. “Do you know me?” 

_You’re Steve, my best friend, and I love you. You’re Steve, and I remember when you were small, so small, fragile and sick. I remember how you looked when I was inside you, how you cried my name out in the dark, how warm your skin was, what you taste like._ But all he says is, “You’re Steve. I read about you in a museum.” 

“I know you’re nervous, and you have plenty of reason to be, but you’re lying.” 

A voice comes over the comm unit Steve is carrying. “They’ve set the perimeter.” 

“I wasn’t in Vienna. I don’t do that anymore.” 

“Well, the people who think you did are coming here now, and they’re not planning on taking you alive.” 

“That’s smart. Good strategy.” 

The comm crackles again. “They’re on the roof. I’m compromised.” 

“This doesn’t have to end in a fight, Buck.” 

This might be the dumbest thing Steve Rogers has ever said. Bucky takes the glove off his robotic hand, flexes metal fingers. “It always ends in a fight.” The fight is coming; Bucky can hear it, like the building is coming to life all around him. His spine tingles. 

“You pulled me from the river. Why?” Steve asks, almost desperate, and Bucky tries not to look at his face, tries not to see the hurt there. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Yes you do,” Steve says, and it’s true. 

And it doesn’t matter at all. 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, your comments bring us great and unspeakable joy, and we'd love for you to follow us on tumblr at [d-lightfulexcess](http://www.tumblr.com/d-lightfulexcess) and [missjanedoeeyes](http://www.tumblr.com/missjanedoeeyes).


End file.
